A major goal of health-care reform is affordable treatment. To achieve it, however, the Obama administration may temporarily upset another aim: effective care. The trouble extends from the president’s pledge to make the new reforms “deficit-neutral.” That will require billions of dollars in funding cuts, primarily at hospitals, which stand to lose $155 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cash during the next few years. The loss should be offset by a boom in insured patients after 2014; for now it’s deepening a clash between hospitals and nurses.

Last month in Minnesota more than 12,000 R.N.s picketed to pressure local hospitals to cap the number of patients seen per nurse. The strike, which was larger than any other nurses’ strike in U.S. history, comes after a University of Pennsylvania study found that smaller workloads can lower the risk of patient death during surgery. So far hospitals across the country have resisted patient-per-nurse limits, calling them unneeded and impractical amid a fiscal crisis and looming reforms. With 18 states considering caps or related regulations, however, they may not always have a choice.

Google Berwick (or just watch actual NEWS shows), and you'll see that's just a drop in the bucket.

Everyone dependent on Medicare or Medicaid should aware that the newly appointed chief (Berwick) of both has strongly, explicitly, repeatedly, and publicly stated and written these and many equally alarming statements about your health care:
• Its primary function is to constrain individual decision-making. (Other quotes along this line include "Young doctors and nurses should emerge from training understanding the values of standardization and risks of too great an emphasis on individual autonomy.") [The first doctor who tries to force a serious treatment on me before I'm convinced of its validity by the preponderance of facts will get some broken fingers. I've already physically jerked back from one doctor who was poised to inject me with something he lied about, and that was on active duty decades ago.]
• It must include wealth redistribution and medical care rationing [earning him the moniker, "rationing czar"].
• He "romances", and is "in love with" the British National Health System [even though it is fiscally and medically crumbling, according to Lancet and many other sources], calling it a "global treasure".

Obama deliberately appointed Berwick over the July 4th Congressional holiday to avoid the Constitutionally proscribed Advise and Consent confirmation function of the Senate.

Google it, pick your favorite information source, let your congressmen know your opinion, and realize that this has been all over responsible news sources, in depth, for a long time.

From the London Telegraph ( http://tinyurl.com/27q7oxg ) comes news of where our health care system is heading if Obamacare is not repealed: Quotes:

Axe falls on NHS services: NHS bosses have drawn up secret plans for sweeping cuts to services, with restrictions on the most basic treatments for the sick and injured.

Patients’ groups have described the measures as “astonishingly brutal".

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered widespread cuts planned across the NHS, many of which have already been agreed by senior health service officials. They include:

* Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.

* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.

* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.

* A reduction in acute hospital beds, including those for the mentally ill, with targets to discourage GPs from sending patients to hospitals and reduce the number of people using accident and emergency departments.

* Tighter rationing of NHS funding for IVF treatment, and for surgery for obesity.

* Thousands of job losses at NHS hospitals, including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.

* Cost-cutting programmes in paediatric and maternity services, care of the elderly and services that provide respite breaks to long-term carers.

The Sunday Telegraph found the details of hundreds of cuts buried in obscure appendices to lengthy policy and strategy documents published by trusts. In most cases, local communities appear to be unaware of the plans.

Dr Peter Carter, the head of the Royal College of Nursing, said he was “incredibly worried” about the disclosures.

As well as sending more patients home to die, the paper said the savings would be made by admitting fewer terminally ill cancer patients to hospital because they were struggling to cope with symptoms such as pain. Instead, more patients would be given advice on “self management” of their condition.

A related article begins with
"40,000 health care jobs at risk in cuts
Thousands of frontline NHS jobs are under threat despite Government warnings that they should be protected, according to nursing leaders.
Up to 40,000 health service jobs in total could be cut, the figures suggest. The move risks sending the NHS back to an era of year-long waits for operations and patients being left for days on end on hospital trolleys, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned. [It] identified more than 5,000 jobs that it says have already been earmarked for the chop. Although the RCN has not extrapolated the statistics, the figures suggest that up to 40,000 jobs could be lost.

From yet another Telegraph article:
Hospital wards to shut in secret NHS cuts
Tens of thousands of NHS workers would be sacked, hospital units closed and patients denied treatments under secret plans for £20 billion of health cuts. … The sick would be urged to stay at home and email doctors rather than visit surgeries, while procedures such as hip replacements could be scrapped. The plans have emerged as health chiefs draw up emergency budgets that cast doubt on pledges by Gordon Brown to protect “front line services” in the NHS. Documents show that health chiefs are considering plans to begin sacking workers, cutting treatments and shutting wards across the country.

The plans are contained in a series of internal NHS documents uncovered by The Daily Telegraph. The final details of the plans are not due to be announced until the autumn, well after the country has gone to the polls for the general election.

Wake up, people. Set politics aside and reverse this abomination or you and your children face grave -- get it? -- consequences. Your survivors will never forgive you if you let Berwick and Obama unleash this monstrosity on us.

Governors of 35 states have already filed suit against the Federal
Government for imposing unlawful burdens upon them. It only takes 38 (of
the 50) States to convene a Constitutional Convention.

This will take less than thirty seconds to read. If you agree, please
pass it on.

An idea whose time has come
For too long we have been too complacent about the workings of Congress.
Many citizens had no idea that members of Congress could retire with the
same pay after only one term, that they didn't pay into Social Security,
that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have
passed (such as being exempt from any fear of prosecution for sexual
harassment) while ordinary citizens must live under those laws. The latest
is to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform that is being
considered...in all of its forms. Somehow, that doesn't seem logical. We
do not have an elite that is above the law. I truly don't care if they
are Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever. The self-serving must
stop.

Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution:

"Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United
States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives;
and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or
Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United
States ."

Great idea about changing the system. I have seen a compelling analysis of this appealing thought.
This is not needed as a constitutional matter. A simple law will suffice. At least some of those who circulate this are health industry lobbyists trying to see how dumb we are.
The main purpose of a constitutional convention will be to give states rights to skip health reform if the lobbyists spend enough money talking locals into it. If enough states can be convinced to back out then the system collapses.
Another benefit to some would be the way a convention stretched out for years would nearly paralyse the US Gov , if that seems like good policy.

Watch out for neo-conservative right wing nonsense. Healthcare reform was sorely needed, regardless of what they say. Only a fool would offer the past as a viable solution, or workable path into the future.

What are Republicans really offering? In all honestly, absolutely nothing. I challenge those that feel differently an opportunity to offer a credible alternative. I sincerely doubt that they have anything noteworthy to bring to the table.

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